What I did to correct my son’s speech delay

A few months ago I shared a little bit about Elias’ speech delay, click here to read it. But I’ll give you a quick synopsis!

We took him to early steps when he was 2 because he was blabbering, not really making any sense. However when we took him, he was saying and doing everything of his age. He scored high in everything and wasn’t eligible to receive receive services for anything.

He continued on in his preschool 2’s class, and then moved on up to preschool 3’s. As the year was coming to an end, we decided to take him in to the VPK readiness program assessment thing through our county. Where they assessed him, and made sure he doesn’t have anything else going on, and blah blah blah (I go more in depth in the blog post that I linked above). But basically he was making all the appropriate sounds for his age and even of a 4 year old (he was 3 at the time), so again, he’s developing perfectly. However, they did notice he was a nasally and wet/slurred speech.

The speech pathologist believes it could be due to an enlarged adenoid. And recommend an ENT. So she sent us on our way reassuring us that he’s doing great! I made a mistake by not getting a written note about what she said about his adenoids. Because little did I know, by not having this note would cause a series of appointments that would’ve been skipped.

Moving forward, we got an appointment with his pediatrician a couple months later for his 4 year old physical, and I spoke with him about my concerns with his speech and what the speech pathologist said, and how we should see an ENT. I asked for a referral so we could schedule the appointment. However, its not that easy to get a referral. If I would’ve got that note from the speech pathologist the first time, I could’ve, but because I didn’t we had to do some steps before he could send us to an ENT.

I was annoyed, but he let us know it’s for the insurance company. They want to see we tried different things first before going to a specialist. So his pediatrician recommended we start him on allergy medicine. Allergy medicine because if it is the adenoids being enlarged, it could be due to something he’s allergic to.

Is it allergies?

So we started him on Flonase (it’s taken nasally) and Loratadine (an oral liquid solution). I’m not kidding, after the first day of taking both the medications, we noticed a drastic difference.

He no longer sounded nasally, and he wasn’t super drooly!! The allergy medicine worked! We couldn’t believe it!

So he’s been on the allergy medicine for the last 2 weeks now, and when we went to the follow up appointment his doctor noticed a tremendous difference. He could actually understand his spontaneous speech!

So what are we going to do now?

More testing:

We are taking him to get bloodwork done for allergy testing. We are hoping we can now figure out what is causing his allergies.

We had 2 options, the blood work, or the skin test. Both are going to be rough for him, but we chose the blood work rather than the skin test because with the skin test he will have to lay on his belly for 15-30 minutes while they prick him on his back, and wait for a reaction. He’s 4 and hates shots, so do you think he’ll lay still for that long while they prick him 15 times? NOPE!

With the bloodwork, it’s one (slightly) painful draw that will be done in less than 2 minutes! And we’ll get the results in a couple days.

Now with any allergy testing, there is no guarantee that we’ll actually find what he’s allergic to. When they do the testing, they test the top 15 allergens, but there are thousands of things he can be allergic to. We’re just hoping we can find the culprit through this test, and be one of the allergens they are looking for.

Correcting his speech:

He has been in a habit of saying things a certain way for so long, but now that he’s able to actually say things correctly, when corrected, our job as his parents is to correct him, and slow him down when he’s talking. So far it’s going great and we know once he’s back in school next Tuesday, and having continuous conversations with his peers and teacher it’ll only take off even more.

We are so proud of him and how far he has come along in the last 2 years and especially the last couple weeks! He’s such a sociable and smart boy, his now clear speech just puts the cherry on top!

If you have any questions about allergies and speech, comment below or send a DM via instagram.